


not giving up (your dreams)

by SimpleGnommish



Category: Morning Musume.
Genre: 9ki appear briefly, Character Study, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-21
Updated: 2020-05-21
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:56:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24298462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimpleGnommish/pseuds/SimpleGnommish
Summary: In the end, you do audition. You figure out you won’t get too far into the audition, and in that case, well, it’s always valuable audition experience for any future modelling gigs.Deep down, and mostly out of pride, you do hope you advance every round.
Relationships: Ikuta Erina & Niigaki Risa, Ikuta Erina & Yokoyama Reina
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	not giving up (your dreams)

_I. Then_

Honestly, you weren’t very interested in idols to begin with. Sure, you remember your mom and you dancing along to Mini Moni songs when you were five, and you did like when Morning Musume and Matsuura Aya went on TV. But idols were just a fact of life, for you. Morning Musume and Hello! Project were just what was popular when you were a young child, and thus, you liked them. They were never that much of a big deal, and after they start fading out of the mainstream public view, you also forgot about them.

And then, when you were about to enter middle school, AKB48 got popular, and you got swooped in by the trend. You sang along to Ponytail to Shushu and Oogoe Diamond and Iiwake Maybe at lunch with your friends, and you remember pretending to be embarrassed when they told you that surely you could audition and get in, basking in every compliment you got.

An AKB48 audition would be too intense for you, you thought. What if you got in and had to meet all those idols that went on every prime time variety show? What if you got to meet Acchan and Kojiharu and Takamina? _You wouldn’t survive_. However, the idea of spotlight doesn’t sound that bad at all, and so, you convince your parents to sign you up at a modelling agency. The first time you appear in a fashion shoot for a kids magazine, you feel a sense of overwhelming pride. 

Then, it’s summer, you are 12, and Morning Musume announces its first audition in about four years. You find out while watching the news and having breakfast, a couple of days before your summer break starts. 

“You should audition, Eri,” Your mother says. “It’s your destiny!”

“The last time I listened to a Momusu song I was in third grade, mom”, you quickly say, dismissing her.

However, you know your mother almost as well as she knows you, and you already fear the card she’s about to pull. 

“Remember when you graduated kindergarten?” She asks, casually. You shudder, because yes, you do remember. “You wrote you wanted to join Morning Musume when you grew up!”

You groan, but it doesn’t stop her.

“And you’ve grown up now, so the only thing left now is to join Morning Musume!”

***

In the end, you do audition. You figure out you won’t get too far into the audition, and in that case, well, it’s always valuable audition experience for any future modelling gigs. 

Deep down, and mostly out of pride, you do hope you advance every round.

***

The lights of the stage are brighter than you expected. Everything since that day in December a couple weeks ago has felt like a dream, and the way you cannot see anything past the stage lights make you feel like you are going to wake up in any second now. 

It’s January 2nd, 2011, and it’s Tsunku in person who announces you as part of the ninth generation of Morning Musume at the beginning of Hello! Project’s Winter Tour. All three, Suzuki, Sayashi and you are the most nervous you’ve ever been as you give out your self-introductions. 

You have been figuring out, ever since meeting your generation mates, that you’ll end up playing big sister to them, as both of them are younger than you. _Only by a year or two_ , you remember, but even that feels like a lot when you are 13. It’s a big surprise, and partly very relieving, when just a couple of minutes after being in stage you all get surprised by a last minute addition: one of Hello! Project trainees, Fukumura, gets chosen as a new Morning Musume member.

***

From then on, it’s all a flurry of activity, and years later, you’ll find out you don’t remember much of those first months, except for the constant feeling of excitement.

Though, to be honest, you do remember something else. The image of all five of your seniors shining like proper stars on stage is something you don’t think you’ll ever forget, for as long as you live. In your moments of weakness, all four of you wonder if you’ll ever look like that.

_II. Now_

It’s a big upset when you are called in to a meeting along with Mizuki and Ayumi only to be told that your spring tour is going to be postponed (And most likely, cancelled) because of the ongoing health crisis. There’s nothing you can do about it, and as your manager tells you, it’s the best thing to keep all of the members, staff and fans as safe as possible. However, as the current leader of Morning Musume, Mizuki is expected to break the news down to the rest of the members, having both her sub-leaders and the manager there for support. 

It’s shitty, you think, that you have to do it. Both cancelling the tour, and telling the rest of the group. This was supposed to be an exciting year, the setlist you had almost been done rehearsing was going to be one of the best you’d had recently. So many things were coming soon for you all, but there’s nothing you can do now, except putting up a strong front for everyone else. Sometimes you wonder if the seniors who came before you also felt like this, because you still remember them as perfect beings, and sometimes, it makes you feel inadequate to be a sub-leader of the group. 

Mizuki pulls you all into a group cheer, and you go through the motions mostly by muscle memory. 

“ _Ganbatte ikimasshoi!_ ”, you yell, deafeningly. 

All of you sit in a circle, brainstorming ideas for videos they can film in the days before the office is inevitably shut down, to be able to keep content incoming for the fans, and you start to drift away.

Absently, you get thrown into making a video with Sakura where you try to remember the choreography to the full setlist from your Fall tour. It sounds pretty easy, but in between you’ve learnt the setlists for your year-end concert, the Winter concert, the Hinafes, and now the Spring concert, and it will probably be trickier than you expect. It’ll make for a nice way to promote the DVD of that concert, your manager says. 

***

It’s been a while since then. 

You maintain some kind of routine, setting aside a portion of your day to keep fresh on your dancing and singing, mostly by coaxing of Mizuki.

“What kind of seniors would they think we are?” She said to you, in a video call. “The new members haven’t been here for a year yet, if they do not keep up their practices, they’ll forget everything.”

She has a point, and you don’t have it in you to argue with her. Recently, you’ve been thinking a lot about how it was when you first joined, and how difficult you must have been for the five older members back then.

“You really were a handful!” Niigaki tells you while laughs, in one of your video calls. “Ai-chan got so mad at you sometimes that she would cry with me after everyone else was gone”

A blush covers your face, and you try to duck down to hide it, but Niigaki knows you, and laughs more. 

“It’s okay now!” She grins at you. “You were so young, I don’t think you realized that being an idol was a job and not a fun club activity until after we graduated.”

She’s ... completely right. You think about Kitagawa, Okamura and Yamazaki, all three of them just as young as you were nine years ago, and think about how much better you have it, because Yamazaki had been a trainee for a while, and that makes her less prone to not concentrating during practice. You say so to Niigaki, who laughs again.

“That’s right! You kids nowadays have it much better than us”, she says, putting on an old lady’s voice. “You also have a village to help you, back when you joined it was five of us, but we felt so overwhelmed.”

You chuckle, because it is true. The ninth and tenth generation had been added so close together that the seniority line was too blurred between them, and later, when Sakura had joined, it was only one person that they had all taught without much frustration, given that she was such a quick learner that you had sometimes even felt envious of her talent.

And then, you had been a member for almost four years when the twelfth gen joined, and it was nine seniors to four members, it was so _easy_. Kaga and Yokoyama had been experienced, having been trainees for so long (especially Kaga, who sometimes still looked like she couldn’t believe she was in Morning Musume now, reunited with Makino), and because Morito had already debuted in another group before, she hadn’t had much trouble, despite having to learn about eighty songs for her first tour. In terms of members, it’s almost like the fifteenth generation is the first challenge you’ve had in a while. 

Soon, you realize that you haven’t really been paying attention to Niigaki for a good five minutes. You shake your head, clearing your mind of your thoughts, and try to change the subject.

“You know, I think our manager finally got the hint that I really want my own Instagram account.”

“Oh! When you do, we should do an Insta Live together.”

***

A couple weeks after that, you do get the permission to open an Instagram account. A public one, because of course you have your own private one. Everyone does, no big deal. Still, this feels like a success, all the monopolizing you’d been doing of the Morning Musume official account finally paying off. 

If you start making more space in your routine for updating your account than for dance practice, no one could fault you. 

When Mizuki notices, because of course she does, she just calls you, and laughs at you. You two end up setting a plan for your next ninth generation virtual hangout, because Riho and Kanon might have been long gone from the group, but you haven’t forgotten each other at all. 

_III. And whatever comes next._

It had been in one of your hangouts with Mizuki, Riho and Kanon that you confessed to them that you’d been thinking about graduating. You took a drink from your beer, to avoid looking at them and seeing how they’d react. 

Deep down, you know they wouldn’t be surprised, or be upset at you. After all, two of them already made that decision years ago, having been ready to set in a new path even if they were younger than you. Something dark and irrational inside you did fear that Mizuki would hate you for abandoning the ship before her. You’ve been together for so long, that it’s almost impossible to imagine only one ninth generation member remaining in the group. 

“Eri-chan, you have been dropping ominous hints to your fans for a long time now.” She says with a small smile.

“I’ve read posts where they say that it’s your way of saying you’ll be a member until your hair turns gray!” Kanon says, and all four of you laugh. 

You have been wording stuff a bit suspiciously for some time now, mostly because it gets a reaction out of the wota. Still, it’s all very vague, and it’s not like you have a plan for after graduating. You haven’t even told your manager any of this. It’s just... a possibility among many. You tell your friends this, although of course, Mizuki already mostly knows. 

The table falls into silence, the four of you picking up more pieces of meat from your barbecue. 

“I think you should always do what your dreams are telling you,” Riho says, looking straight at you. 

And for a while, that had been it. 

***

“If you want to graduate, won’t you wait until after the Olympics?” Mizuki says to you, sometime in Winter, when you are sharing a hotel room while touring with the rest of Hello! Project, and the two of you are getting ready for bed. “I think we can yet deliver our best performance.”

You nod, a bit surprised that she had remembered that conversation you’d had in the middle of food and drinks. She is always so considerate.

***

The world is thrown into chaos, and the Olympics get postponed. It feels like a cosmic message to you, the universe telling you to not graduate yet. You mention off-hand to all your nervous fans that you aren’t willing to graduate before the Olympics, so they shouldn’t worry.

***

For this week, Mizuki and your manager have set up training pairs, whom you are supposed to call to practice together. You have a group call to see who gets who, and you all laugh when Kaga gets Masaki as a practice partner. Poor Kaga sighs wearily, and Maa-chan outright cackles. 

You get assigned Yokoyama, which is nice. You like her quite a bit, and she gets a little starry eyed around you, too. 

That is such a weird thought, because sometimes you still remember being the awkward teenager who had just joined one of Japan’s most important idol group, and trying to fight for her share of fans. You remember not being that confident in your own personality (or talents, because you just couldn’t think you were the most talented when you had joined in the same batch as Sayashi Riho). 

You remember doing a lot of embarrassing things, most of which you don’t regret, especially since some of them were more embarrassing for the other party. Like for example, becoming Niigaki Risa’s biggest wota. 

Look, you reason, you were a teenager and you needed a gimmick that everyone else could recognize. You did manage to go to one of her bus tours as a fan, and that still was one of your favorite memories. It had been a shame when Niigaki had announced her graduation, because you truly loved her. 

Fortunately, out of your own obsession was born a true friendship, and you do cherish being that close with your former idol. It’s an opportunity not a lot of people get. You don’t think Mizuki keeps in that much in contact with Tsugunaga-san, for example. 

One time you’d been drinking together, Niigaki said that most likely, you were her karma for having proclaimed so loud her own love for Abe Natsumi-san back when _she_ had been a new member. You just laughed, denying everything.

Sometimes you think that your obsession with your senior group mate had been only half born out of your need to stand out. To the (slightly) insecure teenager you were, Niigaki as a sub-leader and later leader had looked headstrong, sure and certain of herself, and you felt pulled to her as a magnet. You don’t think you appear as insecure and lost nowadays, but you still feel that pull towards her.

It is somewhat surprising to you that your own juniors seem to be drawn to you. 

“It will be karma when someday you get a tiny child sticking close to you every waking moment of your Morning Musume life!”, Niigaki had said, taking a long drink.

You had laughed, not really believing her. That had been a while ago already, and you had already gotten new members who were half in love with Riho, and half in love with Duu (adding to the heaps of _older_ members who loved them too). You didn’t think what Niigaki had said would come true, considering how you often played the strict senior to your juniors.

And then, Yokoyama had come along. 

The kid is bright, and when she and Kaga had been announced as the thirteenth generation, you were all enamoured of her bright smile. She is a chatterbox and a mood maker, capable of making the whole room look at her and laugh. It is completely surprising, and also, delightful, when she is drawn to the slightly sulkier you. Soon, you find her rising to the top of your two-shots, and you feel a twinge of pride whenever she looks out for you to ask you advice. It is not the same degree of fannish behaviour you know you had towards Niigaki, or that Niigaki had towards Abe-san (Yokoyama doesn’t even collect your trading cards from your singles!), but this whole situation is very funny to you. Karma does exist, maybe. 

You wonder if in the future, Yokoyama will also have a bright-eyed junior of her own to follow her around. It’d be fun, you think, hoping really hard that she does. 

***

The call connects, and you quickly get up from your bed. Yokoyama’s face smiles at you from your phone screen, slightly pixelated. Who knows what the future will bring, but you’d like to keep doing this, and for a moment, you feel guilty about worrying Mizuki with your thoughts of the future.

“What should we do first today, Ikuta-san?” she asks loudly and bright. You rack your head, having forgotten for a moment your training plan.

In that moment, a dog barks, and you quickly derail the conversation, asking if Yokoyama had got a pet. She looks confused, and then launches in an explanation about _neighbors_ and _loud noises_ , giving you enough time to recollect your thoughts.

You can’t help but laugh a little. It’s okay if your practice runs a little late. After all, you are here to stay for as long as Morning Musume lets you.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This is the one of the most self-indulgent things I've ever written, but also, I had really been wanting to write something along these lines for a while. My writing took me not quite where I was planning, but this is it. Honestly, this is inspired by a lot of idol fic that was posted to JPH!P almost ten years ago, that I miss a lot, in spirit.


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